


Pleasure, Punishment, Protection

by DianaSolaris



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Boundaries, Consent Issues, Developing Relationship, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Relationship Discussions, Rough Sex, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 17:11:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16664875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DianaSolaris/pseuds/DianaSolaris
Summary: Bucky escapes his demons by giving himself more to think about - more pain, more bruises, more sensation. Sam's more than willing to provide... with an addendum, and a list.





	Pleasure, Punishment, Protection

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Impala_Chick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Impala_Chick/gifts).



> Prinzenhasserin betaed this for me - thank you!  
> I really enjoyed writing this, and while I've always enjoyed the Sam/Bucky/Steve/Nat OT4, this particular wing of it was never something I paid as much attention to. Thank you for opening my eyes :D

Bucky is starting to get used to waking up with a headache. This time, it isn’t from cheap gin or too many cigarettes the night before; it’s a different kind of headache, loud and low and rhythmic under the base of his skull.

“Morning, sleepyhead,” comes the voice from the general area of the doorway. Bucky glances over, his vision clearing. Sam’s standing in the doorway, smile playing over his face like it’s not sure whether or not it’s supposed to stay there.

“…My head hurts,” Bucky mumbles.

“I’m sure it does. Here. I got you some water.”

Bucky inches up on his elbows as Sam sits down on the edge of the bed. This close, he can see the bruises scattering Sam’s skin. From a distance, they’re not too obvious against his dark skin, but they’re still unmistakably there. On his neck is a bite mark, dark red fading to darker purple.

Bucky takes a sip of the water, looking Sam up and down, looking at the damage he’s done. Then he lies back down on the bed, turns his back to the man who’s been nothing but kind to him, and closes his eyes again.

\---

It was an accident. Sam came with his buddy Cap to Bulgaria, wanting to help. That was what he did – he helped. Besides, he’d been there. He’d seen the pain on Steve’s face when he’d wrestled with the possibility of killing his best friend. And as much as Sam believed that the Winter Soldier was the “kind of guy you stopped” – you had to wonder, right? You couldn’t look up to a man as much as Sam looked up to Steve and not have his desperate idealism rub off on you.

But Sam was only there to help.

So when Sam found himself in an alley with nothing but a handgun between him and the bedraggled heap of a man who almost looked like the Winter Soldier, he didn’t have a plan.

“…Remember me?” Sam asked weakly. “Hey. Hi.”

The man – what was his name again? Bucky, that was it, Bucky, there was no forgetting that name with how often Steve talked about him, Sam was just _stressed_ – had what looked like a length of rebar in his hand. That was cool. Totally fine. Sam wasn’t thinking about how much damage the guy could do just with that.

_He pulled me from the water,_ Steve had said. _He remembers. He has to._

Hope really was contagious.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Sam said, finally. He hadn’t gotten shanked with the rebar yet. That had to be a good sign. “But there’s some folks up there who do. Me, I want to help, and I think you could do with someone in your corner.”

He held his hands in the air, knelt down, and carefully laid the handgun on the ground.

“Work with me here?”

His heart was hammering against his chest. He waited.

Bucky lowered the piece of rebar, his craggy, unshaven face unreadable. Then he nodded – quietly, quickly. It was enough.

\---

There’s still the clattering and clinking of dishes in the kitchen, paired with the almost-inaudible glide of cotton socks on linoleum floor. Bucky isn’t sure if it really counts as a kitchen. It’s one of those combination rooms meant for one person, the entire apartment built for one body. A perfect hidey-hole for two vigilantes on the run. He doesn’t know if Steve knows where they are. He doesn’t care.

( _Do you know who he is yet, outside of scattered dreams?)_

_(bare feet on asphalt, tennis balls on trash can lids-)_

His dreams are often made of darker stuff. They come back to him when he isn’t paying attention, wrapping loose tendrils around his wrists and waist and the backs of his eyelids. His hands shake, his legs go weak, the responses programmed into him start to take hold. Only some of the memories have any substance – others are just ghostly hands or ghostly tongues, their owners long dead and dust, but their impact all too real.

Bucky closes his eyes for a moment, and the noises from the kitchen slowly fade into the sounds of gears grinding – sounds from far away, crawling up on him. There are two choices. Submit, or hide.

He gets up, moving the body that doesn’t belong to him, and heads into the kitchen. He’s done submitting.

\---

The first time with Sam – and every time after – it’s Bucky who initiates it. He doesn’t remember any of them very well, just the overwhelming need to be hurt, to be owned, to be _taken._ ‘Them’, ‘time’ – a lot of pretty euphemisms, really. It’s fucking. Pure, raw, violent sex.

It shouldn’t bother him, really. Sam offered to help. The fighting helps, and so does the sex – it’s just that every morning afterwards, Bucky wakes up, sees the detritus of the night before, and everything feels worse again.

Here, this time, Sam hears him coming up behind him, and turns around with a grin. “Oh, _now_ you’re awake. Maybe you can actually help me with dinner this time.”

It’s sweet. Bucky doesn’t need sweet. He circles Sam’s wrists with his own, closing in and pinning him to the sink. “Hey,” he whispers in his hoarse, aching voice. It’s as loud as he ever gets.

He knows how this goes, how it’s meant to go – Sam will kiss his neck, his chin, his collarbones, anywhere but his lips, Sam will let Bucky sink down to his knees and take Sam’s cock into his mouth with an obedience given out of habit, Sam will come down to the floor with him and fuck him and pretend not to see the way Bucky’s eyes glaze over. The way Bucky’s fingernails dig into his shoulders is just part of the game. The bruises from the fights (sometimes they come first, sometimes afterwards) are just ways of burning off adrenaline. And every time Bucky wants to say _stop, it hurts,_ the Winter Soldier orders Sam to fuck him harder.

But this time, Sam’s hand slinks free of the loose grip and plants itself on Bucky’s chest. “I think maybe we should talk.”

And up it comes. The bile in his throat.

He’s been doing something wrong.

_-monstermonstermonstermonsterMONSTER-_

-his head hurts-

He closes his eyes and feels himself shut down.

\---

Intimacy is not Sam Wilson’s forte. Sure, he’s a good guy, or he tries to be. He works with other veterans all the time, talks to them about their hopes, their fears, their nightmares. He helps Steve, too, as much as he can, and he wants to help Bucky.

The thing is, though, it’s generally a one-way street. Helping other people is just something he likes to do. And even talking about the people he’s lost, the remnants of the war that cling to him – he can do that so easily in the abstract. Those are things that happen to him. Things that belong to him. They aren’t part of him, not until he drags them out of his core and really lays them out in front of him. And he doesn’t do that. Not for other people. Not when everybody else around him is suffering so much _worse._

But for the first time in a long time, sitting across the table from Bucky as he mechanically sips at the glass of water he’s been given, Sam considers – genuinely stops and wonders – if he can keep this up. He doesn’t mind sleeping with Bucky. Hell, he actually likes it. But he aches all over, and there’s a difference between pain for pleasure, and pleasure for pain.

“You with me?” he asks after a few moments.

Bucky exhales, then glances up at Sam from under his long eyelashes. “…Yes.”

Sam leans his head into a hand, smiling at Bucky for a brief moment. It’s charmingly ambiguous, he thinks. _With me._ There is something ridiculously domestic about the whole thing, between the kitchen and the shared bed-            

“I’m worried about you.”

Bucky raises an eyebrow, then snorts. “This is as good as I get.”

Sam doesn’t know how to ask the next part. There is no good way. “When-“ His throat closes. He tries again. “When we’re having sex. Are you here? I mean, are you-“

“What are you asking?”

Sam shakes his head and tries a third time. “Are you having sex with me because you want to have sex, or because you’re trying to hurt yourself?”

The reaction is immediate. The water glass in Bucky’s hand cracks, not quite shattering, and the water starts to bead at the edge of the faultline. Bucky just stares at Sam, eyes cold and distant.

Sam knows better than to take it personally. What would a _good_ reaction even look like? There’s no nice, easy way around these conversations – no fix-it button, no bandaid to cover the bulletholes, no liquid skin to heal up the twisted metal.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says after a moment. “I just don’t…” He brushes his callused thumb over the uneven wood of the table, using the texture to ground himself. “I worry. You know? I wanna help. And I don’t know if I’m… _helping._ ”

Bucky still isn’t responding. So Sam folds his hands into his lap, and waits, trying not to question everything, trying not to believe that he might have made the wrong decision to begin with.

\---

Memory is a construction. Affection is a lie. Attachment is a weakness. These are all things he knows to be true, just as clearly as he knows them to be programs, core commands rooted into him by HYDRA. If he could remember who said them first, it might be easier to tell them to fuck off, and let him feel the way he can vaguely guess he _should_ be feeling. How do normal people respond to these things? How would he have responded, back in that fuzzy part of his life that is still distorted and overexposed and full of noise?

Bucky has no idea. And instead what comes out of his harsh throat is something he hadn’t even known he was feeling. “…Don’t go away.”

“What?”

“Don’t. Please,” he adds. It’s pathetic. He’s pathetic. He isn’t the Winter Soldier anymore, and he isn’t Bucky Barnes – he’s something else, some collection of leftovers. “I –“ He swallows. Talking is hard. Thinking is hard.

“I’m not…” Then Sam gets to his feet, circling around the table and picking Bucky’s flesh hand up from the table. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”

Bucky gathers the courage to look up at Sam. He’s expecting – oh, he doesn’t know. Some sort of harsh expression, or the same steely carelessness he’s used to. But instead Sam is smiling, eyes a little sad but full of the same warmth that Bucky has started to get used to. He doesn’t really have room to complain about people leaving, does he? _He’s_ the one who keeps leaving.

He closes his eyes, a familiar rage rising up in his chest. But not at Sam. Not at anybody in particular – just the ghosts that keep peering over his shoulders.

Then he opens them, and pulls Sam’s hand to his mouth and presses a gentle, almost-kiss to his knuckles. “Okay,” he whispers.

“Okay?”

“No more fighting. I don’t –“ Bucky manages a half-smile. “You’re probably right. I just –“ Talking is hard. Talking is _hard._ Talking is the only way he can get anything done, but-

Sam looks thoughtful for a moment, then reaches over and grabs a pad of paper from the drawer, and Bucky thinks he might cry from relief. Pathetic, still, he knows. But he takes the pad of paper and pen anyway, and while he doesn’t even know if his scribbling is legible, it’s sure a hell lot less humiliating than trying to use a voice that feels like it belongs to somebody else.

Sam reads the jotted notes carefully, slowly. Then he flips over the page and writes something else down. It takes Bucky a while to understand, and even when he does, he’s… uncertain. “What if I don’t know?” he croaks.

“Question mark. I mean, this is – new stuff for you, right?”

Bucky wants to be angry at that. He’s _had_ sex. But sex while living inside a traumatized, disabled body is different. There are different things to think about.

So he looks at the list, and wrinkles up his nose and thinks.

_Biting._ Yes. Biting doesn’t bother him.

_Punching._ He’s about to put yes, then he stops, and puts no instead. Then he moves on before he overthinks it. He doesn’t need to overthink it.

_Restraint._ The pen hovers over the paper and Bucky slowly realizes he’s chewing a hole in his cheek.

“Not on me,” he says finally, and writes that down.

Sam turns a little pink and puts a hand on his hip. “I can’t say I mind the idea of you tying me down.”

Bucky can’t help but imagine it – Sam with handcuffs over his wrists, white rope criss-crossing his dark chest – and shifts in his chair to hide that he’s reacting.

The list continues like that – handjobs, blowjobs, giving and receiving, insults, compliments – and then Bucky hits the last item on the list.

_Kissing on the mouth._

It’s been the unspoken rule since they started living here, secret and safe. Bucky looks up at Sam, who is avoiding his gaze with an uncertain expression on his face. He’s nervous.

Bucky taps gently on Sam’s knee. “Hey.”

“Yeah?”

“Is this...” Bucky points to the list. He still doesn’t know what Sam wants, what the list means on the other end. “You want this?”

“P-pretty much everything on that list is stuff that -” Sam shrugs, the nervousness still obvious in the way he’s standing. “This isn’t  _ about  _ what I want.”

If he had the voice to string his thoughts together, Bucky would argue that. But he’s got a better idea. He gets to his feet, and this time, he doesn’t push forward, doesn’t demand. The ghosts are still there, crawling on him, demanding their due. But he ignores them, just for this once at least taking the third option between  _ submit  _ and  _ run.  _ And he kisses Sam’s lips with a sweetness he thought he’d forgotten how to find, metal-and-flesh palms stroking the hints of stubble on his cheeks and the tips of his fingers stained with black ink and the word  _ yes. _

  
  



End file.
